Republicans Are Making a Mockery of What's Left of Campaign Finance Law

We have had our fun with the newly insane state of North Carolina, and the way that one guy, a gozillionnaire named Art Pope, almost singlehandedly worked to Mississippi-ize what once was called the smart Carolina. It turns out that the state is more properly understood as yet another product of our brave new world of legalized influence peddling. In short, they're not even trying to hide what they're doing any more.

Carolina Rising appears to have broken both rules. Within five months of being formed, and just three months before the general election, Carolina Rising kicked off an onslaught of television ads applauding Mr. Tillis for his work on education and health care in North Carolina. The ads never asked viewers to vote for Mr. Tillis. Perhaps this framing was meant to allow the group to claim that it was talking about issues, rather than supporting the candidate outright. But the firm buying the ads on behalf of Carolina Rising, Crossroads Media, repeatedly described the "issue" in its ads as some variation of being pro-Thom Tillis. In at least one contract, the stated issue was "supporting Thom Tillis, senatorial candidate for N.C. (R) - election on 11/4/14." Dallas Woodhouse, the Republican consultant who ran Carolina Rising, did away with any further pretense when he was interviewed live by a local news channel at the Tillis campaign's election-night victory celebration. Sporting a Thom Tillis hat, Mr. Woodhouse, who was named executive director of the state's Republican Party last month, was asked about his group's spending "a whole lot of money to get this man elected." Mr. Woodhouse responded, "$4.7 million. We did it."

You may have noticed that, last week, just as Hillary Rodham Clinton was demolishing most of the Benghazi fakery, another beloved phony conservative scandal also came apart. The Department of Justice said that there was no basis to charge Lois Lerner, the embattled IRS official who presided over the dumbassery in that organization that allowed a bunch of people to claim that the jackboots had come to call. This has prompted a call to impeach the current IRS commissioner, which George Effing Will thinks is a fine idea, Will currently being the Grima Wormtongue of the unhinged American Right.

The whole IRS nothingburger was based on the agency's being overwhelmed by applications by well-financed ratfcking operations masquerading as "social-welfare" organizations. The understaffed IRS tried to go hacking through the kabuki bullshit to find out if all of these organizations qualified. Most of them, it is safe to say, are no more social-welfare organizations than they are Double-A baseball franchises, as Carolina Rising demonstrates.

Yet less than a year later, when it came time for Carolina Rising to report its activities to the I.R.S., it said it had not engaged in "direct or indirect political campaign activities on behalf of or in opposition to candidates for public office." In an email, Mr. Woodhouse said that the ads his group paid for were "not political in nature" but highlighted issues Mr. Tillis would routinely deal with as a state legislator. They ran during an election for "maximum exposure," he said, not to influence Mr. Tillis's Senate bid. He also dismissed his "overly excited election night comment" as "not reflective of the organization's actions." Carolina Rising has no credible claim to being a social welfare organization. But the key thing to remember here is that Carolina Rising is not an outlier. It's a trailblazer. In 2014, it was one of a new breed of politically active nonprofits that sprang up to assist a single candidate's bid for a seat in Congress, with money from donors whose identities don't have to be revealed.

The whole system is a joke and now, it's not even a very good one, thanks to a Supreme Court majority that apparently lives on the moon. The FEC started off futile and now has reached new levels of hopelessness. People are laughing at it, and bragging about how cleverly they are breaking what laws are left on the books. The rot is deep and general. Here with an opposing view is Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy: "Independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption."

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